Ancient Cities Rise Again

 

Image © Philip Baird, Anthroarcheart.org

Twelve hundred years ago, Central American cities stood where rain forests and howler monkeys thrive today. Some of these cities--Mayan cities--have been discovered (see Tikal above). But others have yet to yield their secrets.

Late last month, U.S. and Guatemalan archaeologists unearthed two magnificently preserved artifacts from a Mayan city's ball court: a carved stone panel described as "the best piece of Mayan art that has ever been found in an excavated context" and a stone altar (that doubled as a goal post). The ball court itself is part of a three-story palace--nearly a quarter of a million square feet (23,000 square meters) in size--in a Mayan city of considerable might.

Meet the Ancient Maya

Before the Aztecs, there were the Maya. Lose any image of small tribal villages led by elders and sustained by simple agriculture. Yes, that's how the Maya got started--and how many Maya live today.

But at the height of their impressive civilization, a so-called classic period from A.D. 250 to 900, Mayan kings ruled city-states fed by farms that reshaped the land using canals to bring water to dry regions and canal muck to raise beds of rich soil that yielded corn, squash, and beans year after year.

Fear Factor

For the ancient Maya, life was a constant struggle between ordered creation and world-destroying chaos. Almost every aspect of Mayan society was thus geared toward staying in the good graces of their 166 (or more) multifaceted gods. Socially powerful priests literally controlled time, learning, and ritual. They presided over the calendar (1/10,000 of a day more accurate than the one we use today), reading and writing (the most sophisticated system of glyphs created in Mesoamerica), mathematics (with zero, no less), and the determination of festival and unlucky days.

The Maya and their puissant priests believed that human and animal sacrifice, bloodletting, and ritual drama and sport nourished the gods and were essential to society's continued existence. As Mayan civilization began to decline around A.D. 900, kings reportedly rushed from city to city performing bloodletting ceremonies in an effort to retain control over their crumbling domains.

Steps in the City

When they weren't catering to their high-maintenance gods, farming, trading, or warring, the Maya managed to build about 40 cities, dotting the map from the arid northern Yucatan in Mexico to the tropical rain forests of Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras. At the height of the classic period, these cities and their suburban agricultural environs were home to as many as 2 million Maya.

Without the help of the wheel, metal tools, or beasts of burden, the Maya constructed 200-foot-high (60-meter-high) stepped pyramid temples and long low palaces from massive stone bricks to serve as ceremonial city centers. The walls of these structures provide a stone canvas for much of the Mayan art that survives today.

The Ultimate Immunity Challenge

Murals, sculpture, and even the Mayan creation story, the Popol Vuh, all record the importance of the Mesoamerican ball game in Mayan society. The first team sport in recorded history, the game likely originated when the Olmecs (an early Mesoamerican culture that influenced the Maya) discovered how to make balls from the products of the native rubber tree around 1600 B.C.

Two teams of two to six players attempted to advance this hard rubber ball down a narrow court and into the opposing team's end zone. The catch? The ball had to be kept in the air without hand or foot contact. In later versions of the game, teams could score by putting the ball through a ring attached to the wall. Winners were praised and richly rewarded, but losers paid with their lives-–priests sometimes sliced out their hearts right on the court.

It sounds unbelievable, but being sacrificed after losing a ball game was actually a compliment. The Maya believed that a sacrifice was only as good as the quality of the object offered, and ballplayers were pretty valuable commodities. They were so revered that the Mayan word for ballplayer was also a ceremonial title taken by kings. Cities poured vast resources into constructing stadiums, players sported elaborate uniforms, musical instruments found at stadium sites suggest a pretty rockin' halftime show, and people lost their shirts gambling on the game.

Seen from between Temple 33 and Temple 34 in the North Acropolis, Temple II emerges from the early morning mist. The North Acropolis was, for most of Tikal's history, the focus of the city's religious architecture and the preferred place of burial for rulers. The eighth-century Tikal king Jasaw Chan K'awiil changed that when he commissioned Temples I and II. The open space between them (now called the Great Plaza) then became the new ceremonial core.

Standing under the shadow of the north side of Temple II, a viewer can see many of the Great Plaza's most important elements: the space between Temples I and II which constitutes the Plaza proper, with its multitude of stelae that record several centuries of the history of Tikal, and the stairs leading onto the North Acropolis, the most important and oldest cluster of ritual buildings in the whole city.   This glimpse of Temple IV, as seen from the top of the main structure at the Mundo Perdido (Lost World) complex, illustrates the dramatic struggle between the lush tropical vegetation and the titanic efforts of Maya civilization to overcome it. Even though the jungle has reclaimed the once powerful city, its tallest temples have managed to stay above the 100-foot tall forest canopy.

The truly massive masonry crest (technically called a roofcomb) of Temple III shoots up from the groping jungle, reaching 60 meters into the sky. In Petén architecture, the enormous weight of these crests forced the Maya to build them upon walls that were often thicker than the narrow inner spaces of the temples they defined. Roofcombs were used as grand billboards for the display of religious and political imagery.

Vegetation all but obliterates the urban spaces of once-mighty Tikal. Yet the few visual axes that archaeological work has managed to retrieve from the grip of the jungle allow us to imagine how the ancient city must have looked, with its towering temples ablaze in bright colors, billowing smoke rising from a multitude of censers, while dense crowds below went about their business in the plazas and avenues of this vibrant center of commerce and politics. Here is the view of the back of Temple III from the so-called Bat Palace.

From: KnowledgeNews